Samsung's Fastest SSD Reads at a Face-Melting 2,500 MBps

Samsung has just launched its latest SSD — and it happens to be the fastest consumer drive it’s ever made, with read speeds of up to 2,500MBps and write speeds as fast as 1,500MBps. That is seriously speedy.

The 950 Pro SSD is an update to its predecessor, the 850 Pro, and boy is it an upgrade: it reads four times faster and writes three times faster. Ars Technica points out that such a dramatic bump in performance is in most part due to the use of what’s called a Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface rather than the Advanced Host Controller Interface that many SSDs continue to use. The problem with AHCI is that it designed by Intel in 2004 for the old spinning-plate HDDs, and as a result it now presents a data bottleneck.

The new 950 Pre eschews the regular 2.5-inch drive format in favour of the M.2 2280 form-factor, sometimes referred to as the “gumstick” format. The SSDs will be available from October in in 256GB and 512GB versions, and the starting prices in the States will be $200 and $350 respectively. [Samsung via Ars Technica via Verge]